Second Language Acquisition of Articles: Empirical findings and theoretical implications: 49

The volume under review contains a very detailed and comprehensive collection of well-written and provocative studies that investigate article acquisition from various perspectives. Multiple languages are examined and discussed; semantic, prosodic and syntactic elements are considered; and a wide variety of test items and methods was employed. The wide scope of studies presented in this collection offers meaningful insight into the processes involved in the acquisition of articles, while at the same time becoming a catalyst for further study. Research into this very specific topic in language acquisition has far-reaching implications for second language acquisition research in general. — Donielle Sharma, Heartland Community College, Normal IL, on Linguist List 21.2574, 2010

This volume is an excellent example of how bringing together studies on a specific theme from leading researchers in a field can lead to a work greater than the sum of its parts. This enables the editors, María del Pilar García Mayo and Roger Hawkins, not only to present us with a state of the art picture of what is involved in the second language acquisition (SLA) of articles, but also to show very clearly how the acquisition of this area of grammar can provide a test case for current SLA theories. This book represents an invaluable contribution to current knowledge and understanding not only of this subfield, but of SLA theorising in general. — Florence Myles, University of Newcastle

The acquisition of nativelike morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge of definite and indefinite articles in a second language is one of the thorniest and most persistent learning problems language learners face. This valuable collection offers findings from several new experimental studies of article acquisition, covering a range of methods and L1-L2 (and even L3) language combinations. The empirical results are brought to bear on important theoretical questions in SLA such as the role of transfer, the role of syntactic, semantic, and prosodic constraints of universal grammar, and the interaction between such constraints and other components of linguistic and extralinguistic knowledge. Readers will certainly come away with a deeper appreciation of what it takes to acquire (and to study) such knowledge. — Donna Lardiere, Georgetown University